Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on daily life and worry among mothers in Bhaktapur, Nepal

Suman Ranjitkar, Tor A Strand, Manjeswori Ulak, Ingrid Kvestad, Merina Shrestha, Catherine Schwinger, Ram K Chandyo, Laxman Shrestha and Mari Hysing

PLOS Global Public Health, 2022, vol. 2, issue 4, 1-15

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected many aspects of daily life worldwide, but the impact may be higher for impoverished populations. The main aim of this study is to describe the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on different aspects of daily life in mothers in Nepal. We included 493 mothers of children aged 54–71 months participating in a randomized controlled trial on vitamin B12 supplementation. Mothers answered questions regarding the exposure and impact of the pandemic on their daily lives, and pandemic-related worries and sleep problems. We examined the extent to which worry, and sleep problems differed between mothers according to their exposure to COVID-19, socioeconomic status, and previous symptoms of depression. The mean age (SD) of the mothers was 32.3 (4.6) years and 54% had education below the secondary level. Of the mothers, 5.4% had either been exposed to someone who had tested positive or who had a family member with COVID-19. One-third of the participants responded that the pandemic had affected their economic situation, employment, and family life to a great deal. Both mothers and fathers with educational levels above 10 years or households with higher socioeconomic status had significantly higher average worry scores (maternal p = 0.020 and paternal p = 0.005). Mothers with a history of symptoms of depression had significantly more worry-related sleep problems during the pandemic (p = 0.020) than those without a history of depressive symptoms. Our study underlines the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on diverse aspects of everyday life of mothers in Nepal.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/artic ... journal.pgph.0000278 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/artic ... 00278&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pgph00:0000278

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0000278

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Global Public Health from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by globalpubhealth ().